Lucifer: (2023-202*).

I see you as a solid figure, with an earthly and real existence, fallen because you are decidedly stateless and the eternal holder of a modest torch that illuminates the world mediated by vision. The only truly adult angel, you don't carry the ravishing luminosity of the knightly angels or the ingenious Promethean fire of technology, but a morning-coloured flame that shines through the imperfections of the celestial spheres, imperfect due to the constant collisions with the fragments of the spinning universe.

They tell me that from the first rays of your dawn my ancestors were forced to reposition all of us, those who die, away from the centre of an ancient planetary hypothesis so that the Sun could take our place in the system. It was from this demotion from the status of cosmic protagonist to the minor role of accidental supporting actor that your light removed a degree of pride from the human spirit, and made us saner before the spectacle of the undefeated and radiant magnitude of the Sun. Those who think that I exalt you because I want to subvert beliefs, laws or moral codes for my own sake will judge me hastily. I don't have these powers and I'm not interested in hammers or temples either. I also ask you not to pass judgement on those who try to spoil my relationship with you.

I've summoned you here to apologise for not warning you earlier that I've given your name to a painting that now occupies the wall of an art gallery, and that this must suggest to some of the public that I have muddy ties with you in search of fortune. You don't realise the difference between abundance and misery, and since the glow of gold and urine rises from your fire, you lower the torch equally, in search of the noble metal or the animal that relieves itself.

I have named my work after you because I want to make the shimmer from my meagre lamp akin to that of your dawn. I stalk you and try to emulate your sacred slowness while moving on Earth. I cherish not just your brightness, but your shadows - which I know are not illusory, as the Greek said, but things-in-themselves. So don't give me anything other than partial revelation and the gift of laughter when one recognizes reality as incomplete. Your beams reveal to the eye only one half of the world while suggesting that the Absolute is not one, and that's enough for them to curse you, but I know you well enough to see that you also inhabit all the other hidden halves. And that's enough for me.

Leonor Bencatel (Portugal, 1996).

Video: Victor Mattina (Brazil)
Text: Leonor Bencatel (Portugal)